What a memorial QR code costs

Prices for memorial QR codes vary more than they should, and comparing the headline figures is the wrong way to read them. What matters is which of two models you are buying into.

One payment, or every year

A single payment. You pay once for the code and for the page behind it. No renewal, no card on file, nothing to forget.

A subscription. You pay every year, or every month, for as long as the page exists. It is a smaller number at the start and an unbounded one over time.

The second model has a specific failure mode, and it is worth being blunt about it. A memorial page is meant to outlive the person who set it up. A subscription ends when a payment fails — a card expires, a bank changes, an executor closes an account — and it fails at exactly the moment nobody is watching. The page does not announce its own disappearance.

What should be included

Whatever the price, check these are in it rather than added later:

• The codes themselves, and how many. A family usually needs more than one: the headstone, an urn, a frame at home.
• Replacement if a sticker fails outdoors. Ask how long that cover runs.
• Storage — how many photographs, how many videos, and what happens when you reach the limit. Some services hide the excess rather than refuse it.
• Who can add to it. A memorial that only one person can edit stops growing the week after the funeral.

The questions worth asking

Four, and they take a minute.

1. Is this one payment or a recurring one? If the answer takes more than a sentence, it is recurring.
2. What happens to the page if the company stops trading? A real answer names a mechanism — an export, an archive. A vague one is a no.
3. Can I get everything back out? Photographs, videos, text. If there is no export, the memorial is a rental.
4. Where is the data held? For families in Europe this is a legal question as well as a practical one; for anyone else it is still a reasonable measure of how seriously the service takes the job.

What the cheap end looks like

Very low prices usually mean one of three things: a sticker with no replacement cover, a page with a hard storage cap reached within a week, or a subscription whose first year is discounted.

None of those are scams. They are just different products from the one most families think they are buying, and the difference only shows up later.

What forevr charges

One payment, and no subscription: 19, 39 or 89 euros depending on how much storage and how long a replacement guarantee you want. Three codes come with every plan, delivery included anywhere in the world. Prices are in euros wherever you buy from.